A post before I go

This is the hot video of the moment. I’m hoping it’s tied into a movie because that seems like a lot of original footage for just a music video.

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Gag gift but the best jokes are in the comments.

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Regretsy’s been outed, and already has a book deal.

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LINKS:

Bits

Sad to say, my people eat this stuff too

Mystery Google (be nice, the next user could be a kid — I searched for “sarah palin” and got “do jumping jacks for five minutes”)

Bacon quesadillaburger flavored popcorn?

Nordic Music Week

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DJ’s phone pic of my Mitch Berg artwork.

Yes, I briefly forgot how to spell “poopyhead.”

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R.I.P.

Aprés netroots

The Netroots panel on trolls went OK although the audience was more diffuse than the panel, adding to a fairly vague and underpopulated hour. DJ Danielson was in the second row and says he put a phone pic of my Mitch Berg caricature on his Facebook page.

I didn’t say we didn’t have any fun.

But I think my panel days are best left behind me. I didn’t lay awake last night worrying about what I was going to say. I didn’t bother to prepare any notes (altho I did have a file folder with some scrap paper in it). Minnesota Observer had notes. Typed notes. Flash brought a laptop and actually used it like a teleprompter.

I just showed wondering if anyone else would and, if so, whether they had problems with trolls or if maybe they were in the wrong room. What I figured out was that AFSCME sent lots of folks and our content wasn’t really relevant to their needs.

Everyone survived and the corporate pr flack on the other end of the second row from DJ seemed to have gotten some usable notes out of the experience. I talked to her thinking she was a reporter but I should have known she wasn’t. Reporters don’t take that many notes.

Stayed for one beer but I fear my schmoozing days are over. Kept talking about getting up and working the room but I didn’t, mostly because most of the people I wanted to see were already sitting at my table.

Old, I am. Getting used to it, more so.

African jazz/jazz/etc tonight. Maybe not what you were expecting but (more or less) it’s what the iGods served up.

I write these posts as I listen to and edit the set. At this moment I have to lose 19MB but I’m not having any luck. Good flow and no shortage of surprises for folks who take the illo too seriously (it used to be a Les Baxter cover). Jazz fusion as I define it is a good thing.

Besides, I have no idea what to call Manu Dibango’s movie music other than jazz fusion. And I see no reason why Santana can’t make an appearance in a jazz set, bearing in mind that Carlos doesn’t do cool. Peter King is someone no one in this country has heard nearly enough of, and how do you argue with Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton when it’s coming from a guy who only keeps their stuff if it fits into a jazz folder?

Link.

Figure 200MB and two hours of music. A deal at half the steal.

No tunes next week as I’ll be out and about for the holidays. Hence the drinking tonight. Pommedrivers again. It’s what I have so it’s what I’m drinking, but I’m sure the variety will be a bit more varietized on the road. I’m not drinking tonight so much as training for the holidays. I may not have mentioned it before, but I have wicked, wicked friends.

Bordering on sick with noticeable pathologies and easily implied anomalies.

I would be a better person had I never met them. A church going member of the Chamber of Commerce mayhaps. Our friendships endure mostly because no one else would put up with them, and me by association. I am without a doubt the most innocent of all passersby in this most abject of sordid companies.

These gentlemen have at various times been lewd, screwed and sued, and not always in that order. Each is in his own right notorious, but sometimes in good ways.

Er, what I meant to say is that you can be notorious for good reasons. I did not mean to suggest that any affirmative interpretation would in any way apply to any of the people I’m visiting, all of whom have a well oiled spade in the toolshed and unlabeled veterinary products in their medicine chests.

In their defense and to the best of my knowledge none of them have ever eaten human flesh. Brains maybe, but not flesh.

And they all acquire their music legally, a practice I cannot understand, condone or defend.

Turning into butterflies

I’ll admit to not being like other people (as opposed to simply not liking other people — also true). Most folks wouldn’t have just spent twenty minutes trying to remember who Michael Dukakis’s running mate was in ‘88, or at least would have turned to Wikipedia faster than I did.

Then again, most folks don’t live in the Twin Cities where Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak recently proclaimed Nov. 7 to be Suicide Commandos Day. And most people don’t hang out with folks who put Russian rock videos on their websites. [WINston and I drove to Chicago back in the late '90s to see Tequilajazzz tear up the Elbo Room.]

Not quite so far away as Russia, but in Norway there’s a Gisleson who’s somehow connected to BigBang, a Scandi metal band with some chops and who by all rights should be on the soundtrack to the made for TV movie that should be made about Elizabeth Lambert, the worlds’ dirtiest female soccer player.

None of which has anything to do with Neil McCormick’s interview with the remaining BeeGees, or Wikipedia’s page devoted to The Beatles’ Twelfth Album.

Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are not people I think of when I think of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, but they’ve both just signed on as producers for Fela!, a musical I’d love to see someday. Fela was Nigeria’s John Lennon to King Sunny Adé’s Elvis, and I was lucky enough to see him twice thanks to First Avenue making a serious effort to bring top African artists to the Cities back in the ’90s.

And Jello Biafra says major labels deserve to be ripped off, but we should pay for his CDs.

Oh, and Media Blitz 189 is up.

So endeth the music portion of this post, unless you count this as music-related.

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Books:

D.G. Myers rips on Beloved, and then revisits it to rip some more a week later. Before thinking unkindly of Myers for hating on Tony Morrison, read his Middle Passage post. The dude knows from whereof he speaks. Jean Toomer, btw, is one of the most significant writers I’ve read who no one else ever seems to have heard of.

McSweeney’s latest project, a one-shot Sunday newspaper, keeps getting rave ups.

Of more general interest, FDL book club checks out David Kessler’s The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Jacob Sullum at Reason has more.

Taking that cue to segué to food:

Heavy Table looks at Somali cooking

The LATimes biannual report on blowfish

A very hard food quiz (they cheated on the camera angles)

My favorite restaurant gets a blog review but in the process is subjected to some fairly inaccurate drive-by gossip

Rogue Smoke Ale (of which The Happy Gnome still has one bottle left!)

Unrelated to food but yeah, this is very much related: Twittified bathroom scale shares your weight with the world. I could see how that might work very well for some people. People more easily shamed than me, that is. I suspect I’d react to that scale like I do radar speed signs: by speeding up!

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Parenting done well.

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TV/movies:

The douching of the airwaves

The new The Prisoner

New Da Vinci Code movie to look at Opus Dei’s founder

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Johnny Ive video on design.

You’re a Mac person, or you’re not.

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Art:

Aminah Robinson

Going as yourself: greatest Halloween mask ever! (and some serious competition)

Tongue-IDed [scroll down, you'll know when you get there]

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Dave Trott still writes the world’s greatest blog, and the world’s greatest Tenth Blogiversary is still tomorrow night at The Happy Gnome!

 

 

 

Sa·tni·t·unz

More than once my self-deprecating humor has been confused with low self-esteem. This situation is compounded by the fact the things I’m proudest of are intangible which is another way of saying I don’t make any money from them.

I’m proud I’m on this list:

Screen shot 2009-11-14 at 4.22.18 PM

Not because I’m TBogg’s biggest fanboy. Granted he’s more concise, better organized, usually funnier and almost always more on target than me, but those are all things I could fix by putting more time and talent into this and the other blog. Mostly talent.

I like it because it’s the highest ranking blog roll I’m on. I think. Hell I don’t know. As many times as I’ve changed my URL and anonymized my tracks, I’m amazed anyone can find my stuff at all. The fact is you don’t work very hard to drive readers to what you’re doing because you’re not doing what you were going to do but haven’t started yet because you’re thinking about something else now and that tends always be the case and by now you’re probably getting my gist.

A long and overly meandering intro into what I was planning to write about when I started this post: a music set for TBogg. And no, he doesn’t have to download it if he doesn’t want to, point being I put this list together for his last Random 10 post and liked it so much I thought I should share.

Screen shot 2009-11-14 at 4.56.01 PM

No #13, btw. Reiko Ike is kind of a running joke with me, she being a Japanese pink film actor who cut one album from which 経験 is from.

Tom apparently had just enough room left on his iPod for 20 songs so the usual Random 10 gang was giving him nominations over which he will now be judge and jury with a post to be written later in which he will attempt to justify his choices for which he will be graded harshly in the comment thread.

#1 on this list, btw, is my all time favorite song/arrangement from this century. I love it so much I misspelled Kieran Hebden’s name in my comment to Tom.

I am such a lousy fanboy.

Download this one if only for that one song. But I also think you’ll appreciate Syysaika for what it is, will wist out with Koushik, flip over Gene Autrey, tap your toes to Tommy McCook not to mention the Surf Champlers before being amazed by Medeski Martin & Wood, blown away by Ernest Ranglin and then bowing to the infuckingeffable cool of Dr. I-Bolit.

I know damned well you can’t get Dr. I-Bolit & Tribal Roots from iTunes.

Steal or be clueless. Theft is knowledge. The law is an ass. Support local music.

And help elect uncorrupt politicians who will legislate us into the digital age so we can get on with figuring out how to compensate musicians and composers. Technology has barely begun to fuck up our shit and we’re still trying to figure who to invoice for the cleanup. Getting rid of the rich and over-compensated won’t be easy but the future sorta depends on it.

Oh, and fuck Ohio State very much.

Fri·ni·tunz

Went to upload tunes to 4Shared and discovered they’ve boosted the file limit to 200MB. Having put some time and thought into this Alaskan-requested Latin set last night, I’m uploading the original 97MB set and that’s that.

Maybe I’ll do a 200MB set next week to make up for my annual vacation the week after that.

This one was hard. I don’t have a huge amount of Spanish and Portuguese language music. This week’s playlist:

Screen shot 2009-11-13 at 5.27.45 PM

And this is the link you can download it from.

As gangster as I could make it without going all reggaeton all the time. I really like the Caracas-based KP9000 as they’re as metal as I care to get in my dotage.

The request was for angry but my music database is geared more for ominous. Here’s the request in full:

Putting a possible bud in your Pyrex for next weeks consideration…a request for a completely angry urban mix exclusively from the southern hemisphere.

First off there was no bud in my pyrex. I checked again just five minutes ago but still no bud, kind, ganja, hemp, weed or even shake. I know, I know. Alaska’s a long ways away but ever since the first season of Heroes concluded there’s really been no excuse for not bending the time-space continuum and just doing it.

Anyhoo this set is, imho, mixed urban music from south of the border. Hemisphere? Wtf?! Mind counting for me just how many cities there are south of the equator in this hemisphere? By saying hemisphere you just counted out Bogota, San José, Managua, Mexico and the entire Caribbean including Cuba and Jamaica mon!

What’s left? Quito, Lima, La Paz, Asuncion, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and — thank god — Brazil. But rather than do an all Rio-São Paulo-Tango set, I worked from all of Latin America.

I cheated. I admit it. But I did it for you, my readers. And your sanity. Brazilian and Argentinian music seems to have been composed each with not being the other in mind. You just don’t segué from Tom Jobim to Astor Piazzolla, Dios to Suba. Not in my sets you don’t.

Shit like that’ll make you car sick.

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Dept. of Unholy Coincidences.

Got this in my email while writing this post.

Screen shot 2009-11-13 at 6.09.23 PMOK, well, interesting to me anyhow. I never get Spanish language spam.

 

Downfunk

R&BsoulViennabasedMongolianCowboyBeBopcountryjazzfunkhoprockhopTomwaits, actually.

Downfunk

After you listen to #4 you’ll better understand why I ruthlessly purged most of what iTunes offered up and broke all my rules by cherrypicking the crap out of this set. Sequentially all iTunes but over 40 songs got deleted before I was happy with the premiere all new brand spanking 100MB/onehour Friday Set (OMBOHFS for short).

4Share’s 100MB limitation is, I think, a good thing.

Downfunk.

 

Godfuckingdamnit

57636177PBS is airing Bill Cosby’s Mark Twain Prize opposite the World Serious and the Celtics-Timberwolves game.

Maybe the first time in a decade I’ve wished I had a DVR.

Luckily the Cosby tribute will air again late Saturday night (opposite SNL in a bit of in-your-face public programming).

But I’m not sure what the point of showing this special twice tonight is, unless it would be to force baseball fans to pick which half of the last game of the Series to watch.

 

 

Links, with Black Canary

I actually turned on the TV for something other than live sports or news tonight.

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Yeah, it’s weird even thinking about it but ABC was premiering V. It’s not based on the movie (which I liked) but on a ’90s TV show (that I never saw). They promoed an anorexic Morena Baccarin. I was hoping Photoshop but I’m sadly reporting that it was in fact a very skinny Baccarin.

If you clicked the link I hope you were as impressed as I was that Baccarin did the voice for Justice League Unlimited’s Black Canary.black_canary_200

Black Canary is sooo hot. I have no idea what planet comic book women come from, but obviously it’s one with less gravity than ours. Or more?

As for V, not bad. Much higher production quality than I’d expected. I’ll definitely watch this one. In a couple of years from a stream or download. No fucking way am I again subjecting myself to so many LOUD commercials.

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Bits.

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Video:

Charlize Theron kissing woman for charity

Supermodels stripping for climate change

We Are Douchebags (OK, maybe it is one word after all)

MPAAprop

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Potlinks:

Hayfork

Breckenridge decided today whether or not to legalize paraphernalia

LA in the ”60s

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No duh:

Digital books will hurt bookstores

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Duh:

Built-in GPS

Your brain on drugs…literally

$75,000 mystery

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Foody:

Umami burgers

Where the commune meets the kale

The Lexicographer’s Dilemma

Pomegranates

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Tunez:

Sting/Obama/Uzbekistan

Media Blitz Radio 188

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R.I.P.$

 

 

HalloWege set

Since only one person signed up for Pandos, it seems privacy is an issue. I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t want my email address stored on my computer if the RIAA comes knocking.

The new solution is 4shared.com.

Better than Rapidshare.de (100% less porn) and because the files stay there until I delete them. Feel free to grab anything I’ve uploaded. Like with Rapidshare.de you’ll have to wait for the timer to start your download.

One catch: the green download signs aren’t what you want to click on. The one that counts is blue.

Oh, and this set is — if you grab all four parts — three hours of music (45 songs) and very definitely themed for Halloween. You can peek at the entire playlist here. I’m still uploading as I post this, but there’s no reason why you can’t start downloading the first part of the set now.

Probably a lot of new bands to you. Everything I could find that was dark and Halloweenish and pulled from my recent downloads folder so this is all new music to me, nothing I’ve loaded into iTunes yet (except for this set).

Familiar names for some would include DJ Shadow, David Sylvian, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, National Philharmonic Orchestra, Melvins, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, Vampire Hands, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Holger Czukay.

Less familiar names? Hanggai, Converge, Oh No, Glenn Danzig, Hauschka, Tomas Dvorak, Mapstation, Jazkamer, Paul Schutz, Asher, Kazi Ploae, Nommo Ogo, Unlearn, Random Inc., Acid Witch, Talibam!, and Odd Clouds.

95745-large

Creepy, ambient, dark jazz, metal, soundtracks (including unreleased music from The Exorcist), noise, and radio promo spots for cheesy horror movies.

Leave a comment if you have any problems with 4shared.com. If this outfit works out well, I may upload some previous weeks’ sets for any of you who are interested in expanding your musical horizons.

iTunes, btw, is up to 76,100 songs exactly. I think I’ve got almost half my library in there now.

 

TheM too!

Got tired of TMiss and realized that TheM was a perfectly good posting handle for this blog. All beside the point, the point being that IT’S PARTY TIME.

Er, not yet. Just giving you advance warning so you can schedule your other partying accordingly.

WEGESTOCK

 

The Happy Gnome doesn’t usually allow patio reservations but because it’s a special occasion, and because it’s mid-November and no one in their right mind wants to be outside…we have the entire patio to ourselves from 7-10 pm, Tuesday, November 17.

It is in fact the tenth anniversary of my very first blog but that’s just a ruse to get people to come out and buy me a beer. The Happy Gnome has some of the best beer in town — including a $50 bottle of some very special stuff from Rogue Brewery. Buy me that one and I’ll seriously consider letting you take me home. Or, more likely, driving me to my home and then helping to pour me up the stairs.

Ten years of intertubular hells. Radio, b2evolution, Nucleus, Textpattern, WordPress, Blogger and a few other platforms that crashed on me more than once. Tons of tech support, design and development from Mark Franaszek, hosting from Sound Internet, James Scherber, and now IPHouse. Guest posts from Minnesota Observer. The opportunity to work with such delightful personages as Tild, Steve Monaco, Brad Zellar, Paul Demko, Pete Scholtes, Britt Robson and I’m drawing a blank on many other names most of whom have asked me to stop emailing them.

We will be drinking in accordance with the 12-step program:

1. Have a drink.

2. Have a drink.

3. Have a drink

Show up and we’ll tell you what steps 4-12 are. Don’t show up and we’ll talk about you.

Feel free to forward this to any blog-reading, lefty Twin Citians of your acquaintance. They don’t need to know me or have read my blog. All that really matters is that they buy me a drink.

Seriously. It’s just that simple. 7,000,000 words posted online and all I ask in return is a lil’ sumpthin’ sumpthin’. In a glass. (This is a classy bar.)

Mark Gisleson
aka The Wege
aka The Mississippifarian